The KonMari Method: Tracking Your Progress in a Bullet Journal

I wonder how Marie Kondo would feel about using a Bullet Journal. Would she see it as a useful tool, or just one more thing that wastes time and clutters up a living space?

I find the Bullet Journal to be a useful tool and so of course I engaged it to help me as I go about my task of decluttering and tidying up my home.

Yes, I realize I spelled Category wrong. My spelling goes out the window when I am tired.

When I read personal development or other similar books, I like to take book notes in my Bullet Journal. This allows me to reference key ideas that I want to remember from the book without having to flip back through the entire thing.

As I began to work though each category Marie Kondo suggests, I created a page in my Bullet Journal to keep track of my progress. I write any pertinent notes I read in regards to that category on the page to help me as I go about my decluttering. When I worked through clothing, I created a line for each subcategory so that I could move at my own pace and know which subcategory I had left off on.

Books were a little trickier. Kondo broke the entire group into only four subcategories. At first I was tempted to break each subcategory down further to aid in my purging efforts. I’m an avid reader and a love of books is something both my husband and I share. We have already gone through three purging sessions before the KonMari method came into my life, and I wasn’t sure we had any more books to purge. I was wrong. Anyways, I realized if I broke “general” books down by genre, I would need more than one page and that was too stressful. The only subcategory I further subdivided was “practical”.

I should note that Marie Kondo believes if you have unread books in your house than your time to read them has passed and they will never be read. I do not subscribe to this theory as a rule. What I am lacking in my life is free time. The unread books I do own I plan to read and I am working through that collection one book at a time in my fringe hours.

The category I am (slowly) working through currently is papers. You’ll notice that I’m not working through the list in order. That is because some of these subcategories have been faster to work through than others, and I am all about success early on in the process. I did the same thing when I worked through clothing. I started with the smallest, easiest subcategories and got those out of the way first.

I find that it’s all about forward momentum. Once you have a series of small success, you will feel motivated to keep going and the larger groups and tasks will be easier to deal with. That huge stack of books on the floor won’t seem that intimidating because you’ll have a feeling of great success behind to you to keep motivating you to do more. I would also like to say that I do not subscribe to Marie Kondo’s theory that all papers should be discarded. This could be why it’s taking me so long, but I’m okay with that. As I said earlier in this series, for me it’s about progress, not perfection.

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